30 Day Song Challenge

The vault of go-to stories that, in one way or another, capture something of what we understand to be the American experience is both deep and diverse.  There are the Horatio Alger-esque “bootstraps” stories. There are “The New Colossus” stories of immigrants, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. There are the “underdog” stories of athletes and artists,…

NOTE: I’ve gotten behind in my posts for the 30 Day Song Challenge, so the next few days are going to be short and sweet, so I can get caught back up. If I choose to listen to music when I’m angry, more often than not I’m looking for some kind of cathartic release, rather…

For the most part, bar band songs become “bar band songs” in the first place because they’re the sort that people can hear over and over again without tiring of them. So I don’t really have a beef with most bar band songs.  I wish that Beale Street bands didn’t play “Sweet Home Alabama” so frequently,…

I won’t ever get married– partly because I object to the state institution of marriage, but also because I’m old and ornery and too attached to my own independence now– so today’s prompt is a bit of a strange one to answer. For the record, I love weddings, I love couples who pledge their lives…

Most of the kinds of music I like– blues, gospel, country, rock n’ roll– are better heard live.  I don’t know if this is true of all genres of music.  I’ve heard my jazz-loving and classical-loving friends speak of some of their favorite albums as if the recording were absolutely perfect, as if no “live”…

My favorite band, The Rolling Stones, has probably appeared more often than any other band or artist in my 30 Day Song Challenge picks over the last several years. Their music sits right in the center of my sweet spot.  It’s great “pop,”of course,  but it’s messy, sloppy, lazy even. All rock n’ roll is formulaic, but…

Every person should have a song that makes them involuntarily raise up out of their chair and shout to the entire world “This. Is. My. Sooonnnggg!” whenever somebody punches its magic numbers into a jukebox. There’s nothing quite like that feeling of your body beginning to move on its own– foot tapping, hips swaying, head bobbing,…

I don’t really consider it a particular accomplishment to know all the words to a song. In fact, I’d happily give up some of the space currently being used in my brain as song-lyric storage if I could consistently remember how to spell avocado or where I left my keys. The truth is that I…

I have a terrible habit of taking songs that I love and putting them in regular rotation on my iPod, or using them as the ringtone (or worse, the wake-up alarm tone) on my phone, and it never fails that, over time, I grow very very sick of them.  This is a worse offense than tiring…

Instead of choosing a song that reminds me of Memphis, I’ve decided instead to pick a song that reminds me of my family home.  In particular, this song reminds me of waking up on Sunday mornings and getting ready for church in my childhood and young-adult years. Mine has always been a church-going family. In…